Jesus People Jubilee: Icon of Awakening

(This is the second of four posts devoted to the Jesus People and their iconic connection to the Fourth Great Awakening of God’s people in America. You can read the first one here. — Author note.)

The Jesus People phenomenon proves there are no spiritual giants but only spiritual pigmies standing on the shoulders of a very tall God.

Most people — Christian or no — realize the apostles who turned the world upside down were obscure, uneducated, and quirky — to say the least. (Paul of Tarsus is one exception; he was educated and signed up some years after the first eruption of Christian faith-spreading.)

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All showed their pettiness and hyper-sensitivity — one major miracle is that the fledgling Church survived in such marginal hands. In fact, the initial outbreak spread throughout the known world in less than a century and transformed the Roman Empire in three.

America’s first and second awakenings were so long ago most people forget their leaders were likewise obscure and quirky — though not necessarily uneducated.

Jonathan Edwards and the Wesley Brothers were small town pastors with a record of failed ministries; Edwards was thrown out of one cure after offending a wealthy family and was known for reading his sermons, spectacles perched and in a voice both reedy and nasal.

Yet when they took to the fields the Holy Spirit reached dramatically into thousands.

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The second awakening was characterized by untrained preachers who rode their territory on horseback. Peter Cartwright was typical; he was known to enter bars, challenge the biggest man to a fight, and preach the gospel to the rest while pounding his opponent into the floor.

The most famous leader — in retrospect — was Charles Grandison Finney, a failed attorney who became filled with the Spirit of God and led thousands to an intimate and dynamic relationship with Him while fighting tirelessly to abolish slavery. It was claimed Finney’s shadow falling on sick people brought their healing.

But these leaders are famous only in the wake of the awakenings; prior to God’s intervention they were Joe Nobody.

Their common elements? A deep desire to be repentant people — people re-focused on God — and a humble spirit that led them to serve as they were sent without entitlement.

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The common element for the rest of us? An opportunity to embrace the reality God sees through His eyes, not ours, and take no offense at His choices.

The Jesus People were, if anything, more obscure, quirkier and in most cases less qualified through prior training and experience. The two primary spark plugs were a couple of recently healed drug addicts named Lonnie Frisbee and John Higgins.

Higgins was dating the daughter of a Four Square denominational pastor named Chuck Smith. Smith himself presided over a failing congregation that had dwindled to 17 members. One of these prophesied over Smith that he would pastor multitudes in multiple nations.

The birth of the Calvary Chapel federation fulfilled this prophecy; the Vineyard Fellowship spun off from Calvary Chapel and augmented that fulfillment.

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Other leaders included burnt-out record producers like John Wimber and reformed outlaw bikers.

Added to that transformative drive to re-focus their attention on God coupled with passion for service to people was a will to operate outside the traditional structures and ethos of the Church. It was not that they disrespected tradition so much as they were largely unaware of it.

This proved a mixed bag; they often missed the good news of traditions that would not have become such without merit, yet they were completely free of that worship of tradition which is traditionalism — the dead faith of the living, according to G. K. Chesterton.

They had few if any sacred cows to sacrifice. But why call them iconic for the upcoming and now-birthing Fourth Great Awakening?

Social, political and spiritual conditions are seriously parallel. As in the 1960s, the churches are entrenched in mediocrity. Some imagine themselves prophetic because they reject the witness of Scripture and seek a more socially relevant message. Others defend the biblical witness but are so steeped in legalism and judging their neighbors they offer no good news worth repeating. Still others content themselves with ecstatic experience or a traditionalism to which non-adepts have little access.

And most — this is a gross generalization to make a point — refuse to place themselves or their members at risk for the sake of an active witness.

America is ripe for an eruption of faith brought on by people caught up in God’s Spirit who are not famous and are uninvested in the prevailing culture … of the Church.

Such people will see God through the Scriptures themselves — all of them. They will seek His Spirit — all of it. And they will cheerfully abandon sacred cows of doctrine and practice that do not really connect with Bible or Spirit.